Making the cover

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There's nothing ordinary about superstar Alicia Keys. So we decided to go for something extraordinary in the creation of this cover story. Prior to the cover shoot, we'd only heard tidbits about the new album. That it was raw, real, full with the power that is Alicia. We had been told that there was one song called "Superwoman," and with that, the creative juices started percolating.

I've known Alicia Keys since she first stepped on the scene as a serious musical artist, so I knew that even when she was a teenager she could assume a Superwoman posture and contend with the best of them. Now that she's a young woman, ripe in her creative expression, that task would be an easy feat. So, EBONY'S photo director, Dudley Brooks, and I presented her with the concept of showcasing the Many Moods of Alicia Keys--from the fantastic to the ethereal, the vulnerable to the invincible. She was game!

We booked time in an amazing space, a nightclub called Hiro, in the bowels of the Maritime Hotel in Manhattan. Little did we know that acrobatic dancers work nights there. We enlisted the support of Tatyana Petruk, the lead dancer at Hiro, to teach Alicia how to position herself on a ring suspended in mid-air. We wanted to invite the Superwoman in Alicia to come forth. Suffice it to say that we were not disappointed!

Alicia posed hanging from ropes, above ground and just hanging out. She was completely willing to go with the flow of Alicia--sharing the fullness of her with us, with the EBONY readers--as she offers this newest expression of her creativity, her third studio album, As I Am.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning